Gender Associations: Sport, State Schools and Australian Culture

The physical culture of government schools in Australia was shaped by
the practices of sport, physical recreation and exercise and by the
institutional imperatives of the school. With only a few exceptions, state
schools were co-educational, in contrast to schools serving the privileged
classes, which were almost entirely single sex. The single sex
institutions' explicit uses of physical cultural practices to construct the
gendered identities of girls and boys have been well documented by
historians.! Less well understood are the co-educational government
schools' uses of physical cultural practices to construct gendered
identities. This is in part due to the delimited range of ways in which the
majority of Australians were able to experience sport, physical recreation
and exercise during the first 50 years of the twentieth century. It is also
due in part to the narrow and pragmatic uses of physical activity to meet
the schools' institutional requirements for social order.